The textbooks used to teach GCE A-level biology 30 years ago tended to concentrate on
traditional zoology and botany, with just a passing reference to evolution. As biology established
itself as a new discipline, books (and syllabuses) began to take an integrated approach, and
evolution became an important theme that helped students to appreciate the interrelationships
between plants and animals, cells and molecules, biochemistry and physiology, systematics and
genetics, and ecology and behaviour. With the modularisation of modern specifications this theme
has all but disappeared from textbooks and a detailed discussion of Darwin and the evidence for
evolution has been replaced by perfunctory references to variation and selection and, in some
cases, politically correct acknowledgements of creationism
